The Pedagogics of Liminality: Rites of Passage in the Work of Kazuo Ishiguro

Twelve presentations, each of around fifteen to twenty minutes, were delivered in three different panels over the two days. The first panel, entitled Challenges, brought together four papers reflecting on the experience of changing from the transition from postgraduate research student to tutoring, teaching and lecturing.

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Rites of Passage

10.1093/oso/9780198702603.003.0007 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Axel Michaels

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle ◽

Old Age ◽

Sexual Maturity ◽

Rites Of Passage ◽

Life And Death ◽

Transformational Process ◽

Local Contexts ◽

Vulnerable Community ◽

History Of ◽

The Individual

This chapter examines the classical Hindu life-cycle rites, the term saṃskāra and its history, and the main sources (Gṛhyasūtras and Dharma texts). It presents a history of the traditional saṃskāras and variants in local contexts, especially in Nepal. It describes prenatal, birth and childhood, initiation, marriage, old-age, death, and ancestor rituals. Finally, it analyzes the transformational process of these life-cycle rituals in the light of general theories on rites of passage. It proposes, in saṃskāras, man equates himself with the unchangeable and thus seems to counteract the uncertainty of the future, of life and death, since persons are confronted with their finite existence. For evidently every change, whether social or biological, represents a danger for the cohesion of the vulnerable community of the individual and society. These rituals then become an attempt of relegating the effects of nature or of mortality: birth, teething, sexual maturity, reproduction, and dying.

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Discrepant Solace

10.1093/oso/9780198789758.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David James

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

Kazuo Ishiguro ◽

Joan Didion ◽

Julian Barnes ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

History Of ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Ian Mcewan ◽

Affective Meanings

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature’s work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation’s kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing.

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Living in dual liminal states: Navigating the loss of my father and my clinical career during a pandemic

Qualitative Social Work ◽

10.1177/1473325020973346 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 20 (1-2) ◽

pp. 138-141

Author(s):

Jennifer Currin-McCulloch

Keyword(s):

Palliative Care ◽

Social Interaction ◽

Social Worker ◽

Rites Of Passage ◽

Developmental Transitions ◽

The World ◽

Professional Conflicts ◽

The Voice ◽

Insight Into

Drawing from Van Gennep and Caffee’s conceptualization of liminality, this autoethnographic narrative portrays the author’s rites of passage into academia and through the death of her father. These fundamental developmental transitions and losses emerged concomitantly within the backdrop of a pandemic, further cloaking the world in grief and disequilibrium. Incorporating the voice of the personal as professional, the author portrays her existential struggles in relinquishing her cherished role as a palliative care social worker and living through her dad’s final months during a time of restricted social interaction. Interwoven throughout the narrative appear stories of strife, hope, grief, and professional epiphanies of purpose and insider privilege. The paper embraces both personal and professional conflicts and provides insight into the ways in which the unique setting of a pandemic can provide clarity for navigating the liminal states of separation, transition, and incorporation.

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